Preparation makes perfect: Hawks not taking it easy in preseason

SOUTH BERWICK, Maine — To beat the best, you have to play the best. Or, in the case of the Marshwood High School girls lacrosse team, scrimmage the best.

With 10 players returning to a team that fell a game short of an appearance in the state final, Marshwood coach Bernie Marvin thinks his team is ready to take the next step. So he scheduled a number of preseason scrimmages against high-profile teams, including New Hampshire powerhouses Portsmouth and Exeter.

“I asked (athletic director Rich Buzzell) go out and get the toughest, and he did it,” Marvin said. “We were psyched to play against those team because our toughest competition I don't believe will approach Portsmouth or Exeter.”

It's not that the Hawks believe they will breeze through their region, but the foundation that went 11-4 and lost 13-3 to Scarborough in the Western Maine Class A final in 2012 returns pretty much intact.

“We have basically our whole team back,” Schoff said. “We have some really good, talented players and we're finding a rhythm. We're getting it going for real. All of the seniors have been playing together since freshman year, and now it's all clicking together.”

Add midfielders Korrine Bohunsky (29 goals as a freshman in 2012) and Lindsey Poirier (22 as a freshman) to the mix, and the Hawks will have one of the most talented scoring attacks in the state.

The fact that the team has been playing together for a while doesn't hurt, either.

“These kids have been playing together for three, some of them four, years,” Marvin said. “And I think they enjoy playing together and they do it for each other. It's a great thing, as a coach, to watch kids playing for each other.”

Defensively, the Hawks will be formidable. Top defenders Hannah Ferguson, Abby Hyson and goaltender Meghan Lewis anchor a unit that was second best in Maine last year, surrendering an average of 6.33 goals a game.

“We want to go back (to the regional final) and we know what it takes to get there,” Lewis said. “We know how much we want to get back there.”

As far as a rigorous pre-season slate of scrimmages goes, the Marshwood players are up to the task.

“We're all grateful to be playing these tough teams, maybe they're even tougher than we play in the regular season,” Schoff said. “It's just going to test us. Win or lose, it's a scrimmage and we're going to go hard. It's just going to show us where we're at, and we'll be watching the other teams too, learning from them.”

Last year's success came as a surprise to some of the players on the team.

“None of us really expected to go as far as we did,” Gori said. “We had no idea how far we would go and how good we were going to be.

Now the Hawks know they can compete with the best teams in the state and expectations are much higher this year, but Gori said they can't take any opponent lightly.

“We have to have the same mentality as the year before,” she said. “We don't know what's going to come.”

Marshwood opens its season on April 22 against rival Noble, but by then, the Hawks will already be a well-seasoned team thanks to its scrimmage schedule.